On January 15, 1919 Rosa Luxemburg was murdered by far-right paramilitary groups, supported by Germany’s first social-democratic chancellor Friedrich Ebert. Her skull was smashed into pieces and her body was flung in Berlin’s Landwehr Canal where it was found disfigured several months later.

Luxemburg was one of the most interesting and original Marxist thinkers of the twentieth century and a leading representative of the socialist movement. Her death and the circumstances leading up to it brutally epitomize the end of social democracy as a revolutionary, international, anticapitalist project.

Themes addressed in her work like the development of globalization, the crisis of financialized capitalism, the constraints of electoral politics, the relation between parties and movements, the threat of war, and the centrality of internationalism have, one hundred years after her death, assumed renewed relevance. A century since her murder, Luxemburg’s life and work is illuminating for our predicament today.